Kushana Bush

Dunedin-based artist Kushana Bush carefully blends the styles of Fourteenth century Florentine primitives, African sculptures, erotic Japanese Shunga art and Indo-Persian miniatures into precisely detailed works that blend exquisite aesthetic delights with all the polymorphous perversity of humanity’s kinks and fetishes. Each image is full of extraordinary secrets and satisfying discoveries with a twist as her wounded and fallible antiheroes fight, fumble, fondle, fall all over each other and quite possibly another ‘f’ word, all filtered through Bush’s gimlet-like anthropological gaze.

She has been the recipient of a number of awards including an Art and Australia award (2009), a Christchurch Art Centre/Asia NZ Foundation artist residency in Chandong, Seoul, South Korea (2009), the University of Otago Frances Hodgkins Fellowship (2011) and has exhibited widely here and in Australia. Bush was the recipient of an Arts Foundation New Generation Award in 2013 and in 2014 had twelve paintings included in the Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition Where do I end and you begin at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh. From December 2016 to April 2017 Bush exhibited a show of twenty-two works in The Burning Hours, at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in 2016 and 2017.
 

Dr Andrew Paul Wood